1) Many impacts are not just small, but effectively zero, or even slightly negative. Spending more effort/resources to do things that APPEAR good but actually don’t matter, is a net harm.
2) Some items have threshold or nonlinear impact such that it’s near-zero unless everybody (or at least more than are likely) does them. This gets to second-order arguments of “my example won’t influence the people who need to change”, but the argument does recurse well.
3) The world is, in fact, full of irresponsible people. Unfortunately, it’s mostly governed by those same people.
4) Reasons given for something don’t always match the actual causality. “It wouldn’t matter” is more socially defensible than “I value my comfort over the aggregate effect”.
5) Relative rather than absolute measures—“I’m a sucker” vs “the world is slightly better”.
Possible explanations:
1) Many impacts are not just small, but effectively zero, or even slightly negative. Spending more effort/resources to do things that APPEAR good but actually don’t matter, is a net harm.
2) Some items have threshold or nonlinear impact such that it’s near-zero unless everybody (or at least more than are likely) does them. This gets to second-order arguments of “my example won’t influence the people who need to change”, but the argument does recurse well.
3) The world is, in fact, full of irresponsible people. Unfortunately, it’s mostly governed by those same people.
4) Reasons given for something don’t always match the actual causality. “It wouldn’t matter” is more socially defensible than “I value my comfort over the aggregate effect”.
5) Relative rather than absolute measures—“I’m a sucker” vs “the world is slightly better”.
6) The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect may not be a real thing, but there is an element of social proof in the idea that if most people are doing something, it’s probably OK.